The Philosophy of Ryan Hall

A shaggy blond man loped along the streets of Santa Monica early on Friday morning, two days before the Los Angeles Marathon. He wore a white shirt, black shorts, and a yellow cap pulled low, from which his surfer shag nonetheless hung, nearly obscuring his eyes. He chatted easily, with his California lilt, about a recent trip to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where he ran long hours through the hills.

“You’re just, like, crawling on these runs at nine thousand feet, and we’re running on these grass fields. They just go forever, you know,” he said. “So it’s a soft surface, and sometimes you just feel like you’re just melting into the ground. And then you’re surrounded by thousands of Ethiopian guys who are just, like, flying all around you.”

“Good luck, Ryan!” someone on the sidewalk shouted as he passed.

Ryan Hall, at thirty-two years old, is best known for running a marathon faster than anyone else born in America ever has: he finished the 2011 Boston Marathon in two hours, four minutes, and fifty-eight seconds. He’s since become known for failing to meet the high expectations set by that feat; the races he’s been able to run over the course of the past four years have almost all been underwhelming. He dropped out of the 2012 Olympic marathon after ten miles, and then finished twentieth in Boston in 2014. Worse, he’s often failed to reach the starting line: he withdrew from Chicago in 2010, New York in 2012, and both Boston and New York in 2013, citing injury or fitness issues. All of these failures came during what should be the prime of a distance runner’s career.

As Hall jogged through the streets, his wife of nine years, a bright-eyed brunette named Sara—who is also a professional élite runner—followed closely behind, as did his tattooed and bearded manager, Tony Herr, whom he’s known since high school. The pace was a relatively relaxed seven minutes per mile. Hall, who has trained mostly without a coach for the past few years, wore a watch, but ignored it. He planned to run an easy five or six miles at this “shake-out” pace until he decided it was time to stop.

Ten minutes into the run, Hall’s hat blew off in the wind, reaching the edge of the busy street. Turning to help, Sara tripped and fell on the grass. Hall reached into the street and snagged it, just as a car sped by. No one seemed alarmed.

Despite all the professional pressures, Hall seemed relaxed and ready to run his first marathon in nearly a year, just a few hours from his home town of Big Bear Lake. His running career started there, at the age of fourteen, when he decided to run the full fifteen miles around the lake with his dad. Hall completed this run, and with, he says, God’s urging (he’s a devout and outspoken Christian) kept on going, all the way to an exemplary running career at Stanford University, where he was the five-thousand-metre N.C.A.A. champion, and to a spot on the starting line at the Beijing Olympics, where he finished a disappointing tenth. (Peter Hessler wrote about Hall for the magazine before those Olympics.)

The latest bad news: forecasters were predicting record heat in Los Angeles on race day, approaching ninety degrees. Hall waved off the notion that this would have any significant bearing on his performance. The starting time had been moved up, to 6:55 A.M., and the temperature wouldn’t breach seventy-five before he finished the race. “It’s definitely not what I would order for the day,” he said. “I’d be like, the colder the better. But, at the same time, everyone has to run in it.”

A few hours after his morning run, in the back of a cab stuck in traffic on the way to a pre-race press conference, Hall was in a talkative mood. He spoke about the meaning of the past few years of his life, since setting the record in Boston.

“The level of joy I’m capable of experiencing now is not dependent on me winning the Olympic Games or me running 2:02 in the marathon,” Hall said. “All it’s dependent on is how connected I am with God. I’m glad that it’s not exclusive. Winning the gold medal or winning the L.A. Marathon or whatever—one guy is going to do that, and everyone else is going to be disappointed.” He went on, “I don’t like that about sports. I want everyone to experience the elation of what it’s like to win the gold medal, but obviously that’s not possible. But we can experience a joy that’s even deeper than that—like, every single person, every moment of every day. It’s possible.”

“Running can be such a beautiful sport,” Hall said later. “An amazing experience for everyone. But I’ve also been on the other side of that, where I’ve lived for the victories and the performances and I just—I know how shallow and fleeting and chasing-the-wind that is. So it breaks my heart when I see other people doing that same thing I’ve done, and knowing what they’re in store for.” He added, “It’s like, ‘Dude, no matter what you accomplish, it’s not gonna fill you up. It’s not what you’re looking for.’ “

Still, Hall remains a professional runner, paid large sums simply to show up and race. Why does he keep racing if victory has diminished meaning for him?

Hall described his goal: “To never compare myself to myself or anyone else. I think comparison is bad. It’s bad in sports, it’s bad in life, it’s bad in writing, it’s just bad. But it is called a competition, so how do you do a competition the right way? For me, that’s where it comes back to excellence. I try and get everything out of my body that God’s put in me, the best I can. You hear it a million times—‘Just do your best’—but, really, that’s all you can do.”

“The truth of the matter is you can only have your best day ever once in your life, you know what I mean?” Hall said. “And yeah, you can keep having a better day than you ever have before for a while, but eventually, we’re all human and we’re all gonna get worse. You can only have your best day ever once. So if all you’re gonna do is compare your best day ever to every other day, you’re just gonna be disappointed for 99.9 per cent of your life. That’s just the logistics of it.”

Hall is a student of others sports—boxing and basketball, in particular—and he likes to cite the wisdom of other élite athletes, like Dan Gable, the wrestler who won a gold medal for the United States in the Munich Olympics. “He never even got a point scored on him during the whole entire Olympics,” Hall said. “I remember listening to him give a talk, and he said his goal in training was always to make himself pass out. But he could never do it. And I think that kind of hits on, like, you don’t get your best performances by trying harder. When you see the guy who wins the race, he usually jogs out of it waving to the crowd, feeling good. The people who look the worst come in after the top guy.”

“Great performances, when they’ve happened in my career, have come out very organically,” Hall continued. “They were fun, and I enjoyed it, and it came with great excitement. It wasn’t like I pushed harder than ever. It was just flowing, like a physical sensation.” He cited his record-setting half-marathon, in 2007, as an example: “When I ran fifty-nine minutes, I was just feeling like a million bucks. I couldn’t help but run fast. And yeah, I was pushing hard or whatever. But when I finished that race, I felt like I could have gone another ten miles, honestly.”

“I’m not afraid of failure,” Hall said later. “I don’t take it personally. So if I blow up, I’m bummed for sure, but it’s like, life goes on. It doesn’t define me. So I’m not afraid to take big chances.”

Hall described his mentality going into the L.A. Marathon: “I’ve put in all the work, all the workouts I was supposed to do. I’ve done them all, but they haven’t been, like, I’m feeling like a million bucks and ready to go smash some world record or something.”

“I like to go into a race not expecting anything,” he said. “Not expecting to feel like a million bucks. Not expecting to hit certain splits or the race to unfold a certain way.” He went on, “I like to go into a race with not a real strong, set game plan, but just knowing that I’m going to take my swing at some point in the race, and then see what happens.”

“I think that believing who you are, knowing who you are before the race is so important,” Hall said at one point. “A lot of athletes are trying to prove themselves through their performances. I’m trying to be aware of who I am so I can perform at my highest level. Which is a lot different.”

He got out of the taxi and headed into the L.A. Convention Center, where he was scheduled to give a press conference along with the other élite runners. He was not chaperoned, and it took him twenty minutes to find the right room. As he wandered around aimlessly, not particularly concerned, at least a half dozen people asked him how he was feeling. “Pretty good,” he said. “Pretty good.”

At the press conference, he had this to offer: “I’ve never seen myself as being different from anyone else in the world.” The interviewer who had prompted this response didn’t quite know how to follow up.

Less than forty-eight hours later, having faded from the lead pack, Ryan Hall dropped out of the L.A. Marathon at the halfway point, shortly after a group of lesser-known American runners caught up to him. (His wife, Sara, finished far behind the female leaders, with a lackluster 2:48:02.) The American distance-running community has long hailed Hall as the next chosen one, but this latest result has even his most ardent remaining fans turning away. “He’s done,” a commentator on the popular LetsRun online forum wrote yesterday. “He’ll never be competitive in the sport again.”

Hall, meanwhile, wasn’t ready to answer questions after his latest disappointing performance. But Herr, his manager, spoke very briefly to his old friend a day later: “He says he needs to freshen up a bit and get back on the horse. Life is about how hard you get hit and keep moving forward.”

Charles Bethea is a freelance journalist based in Atlanta and a regular contributor to newyorker.com.